Some thoughts on this whole episode - A key piece of iTheme’s business infrastructure (which they were planning on migrating/updating from if I understand their communications correctly) was vulnerable and attacked. It’s a real shame the passwords were stored in plain text but apparently that vulnerable business system used to only do plaintext passwords until 2011.

So if you started a business in 2008 (like iThemes did) and you’re busy trying to make money and build up your company, its easy to see how these business systems get pushed to the back as far as time and resources and attention go because they don’t directly make the money the business needs to survive and grow.

I think what this episode really illustrates is to make sure your business infrastructure is easy to replace if needed and to make sure to invest a portion of your business time and resources in updating and maintaining your business infrastructure.

So instead of taking iThemes to task - which they've already admitted they've made a mistake and are working on fixing the problem and making sure it doesn't happen again - what are we doing to make sure our essential business systems are getting appropriate attention and maintenance? Or making sure we have a replacement *when* our systems are attacked and compromised?

I do think iThemes has done a really great job of explaining what has happened, admitting the mistake, explaining how to mitigate the issue, and that they're in the process of permanently fixing the issue. And they're being very transparent about it. I like that.